Permalink Nightmare

17 March 2008 199 views No Comment

Yesterday I switched my permalink structure within WordPress, so my links would reflect the title of the entry and not just some cryptic page ID. Everything seemed to work fine and I was absolutely happy – SEO (search engine friendly) URLs, here I come! May Google crawl my site and digest my content.

But this morning, out of curiousity, I clicked on my sub-pages (About, Pictures…) and they only returned a 403 error. To make a 6+ hour trial-and-error-marathon short: changing the permalink structure worked fine for blog entries, but not for sub-pages.

After installing, activating and de-activating several plugins, manually adjusting the .htaccess file and many more trial and error attempts I was close to giving up. That’s when I found this post, explaining how to customize the structure of the permalinks and it worked.

What you have to do is to use string: “/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/”

It inserts a .php file before everything – I have no idea why, but it helps. I hope Google won’t mind the trick, but at least my links now are more legitible and my sub-pages are accessible as well. YAY!